Kintsugi is a tradition in Japanese ceramics of mending cracks with gold, literally transforming breakage scars into gleaming veins of magic. This poetic spirit of not only accepting but embracing and elevating accidental damage into opportunities for transcendent and poignant expression is the same that motivated photographer Johnny Cubert White to keep capturing images long after his beloved Canon G9 lost its battle with gravity in spectacular manner. The fall scrambled the machine’s digital innards, resulting in unpredictable, color-bending, refractively lit and richly shadowed, motion-sensitive, prismatic effects. Where another kind of artist might have seen as a loss, Johnny White saw the birth of what became his most powerful work to date.
My Broken Camera is an ongoing project using the post-incident technology to capture images of the people, places, events, and moments that are enhanced by motion blur, distortions, solarizations, interferences, hauntings, and halos. In the world these images depict, anyone and anything can become art in an instant -- and there’s no such thing as a mistake. The overall series has so many iterations that it’s getting organized into sub-series around themes such as architecture, street scenes, and character studies of the eccentric fashionistas, actors, artists, writers, and bon vivants who populate that world.
The photographs chosen to represent his work is of the My Broken Camera Doppelgänger family. Doppelgänger courts the double-exposure presence of two figures in a frame — often in fact a single figure and their shadow-self, #mBcDOPPELGÄNGER.
White is a maker of still and motion pictures. A graduate of the prestigious The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, White received his MFA in experimental filmmaking; and a BA in philosophy & writing from Atlanta's Oglethorpe University. Johnny White has spent his life creating and producing a wide variety of projects.
Having begun his exploration of photography in the mid 1970’s - White has experimented with various mediums of the photographic image from lenticular 3-D, 35mm, and digital processes. He favors the avant-garde and those of the sub culture he finds dominant.
DOPPELGÄNGER is the most recent series of digital photographs released from Johnny Cubert White's internationally acclaimed series of unedited /unphotoshoped #myBROKENcamera images. Each image presented is available in print form - 12 in total - or as an NFT - a 1 of 1 digital edition.
“SNOW MERCY”
“INDI GENIUS”
“DEMASKED ANGEL”
